Oct

1

1943

The Allies welcomed as they enter Naples

Daimler scout car of 1st King’s Dragoon Guards at the town hall in Naples, 1 October 1943.

A truck carrying American troops moves through a rubble-filled street in Naples.

Finally the Allies were able to break out of the Salerno bridgehead and make progress northwards. The Kings Dragoon Guards entered the city on the morning of the 1st October, closely followed by substantial Allied forces, including General Mark Clark, later in the day.

The Germans had withdrawn to a better defence line, but not before they had destroyed what they could of the great city. They attacked not just the harbour area that would facilitate the Allied advance but municipal facilities that served the general population. The main aqueduct bringing water to the city was blown up and explosives were dropped into over forty main sewer lines. It did not take long for disease to take hold.

Every vessel in the harbour had been sunk, along with the entire fishing fleet. Almost every factory had been looted and then gutted. Alongside this were the libraries and art collections that were gratuitously burnt to the ground. It was a foretaste of what was to come for the rest of Italy.

Amongst those arriving that day was the journalist Alan Moorehead:

As we drove over the Sorrento peninsula and caught sight of the city for the first time it appeared that nothing had changed. The black cone of Vesuvius smoking gracefully on the right. The island of Capri serenely floating beyond the mouth of the bay. The crenellated city spilled along the shore, and that same mesmerizing blueness in the water. Sunshine and orange groves. Brilliant creepers on the tumbling walls. The enervating atmosphere of a long lazy summer’s afternoon.

Driving through Castellamare and Pompeii the crowd thickened steadily along the road. On the outskirts of Naples itself it was one tumultuous mob of screaming, hysterical people, and this continued all the way into the centre of the city. They had been cruelly bombed. There had been spasmodic street fighting for a week. And now they stood on the pavement and leaned out of their balcony windows screaming at the Allied soldiers and the passing trucks.

They screamed in relief and in pure hysteria. In tens of thousands the dirty ragged children kept crying for biscuits and sweets. When we stopped the jeep we were immediately surrounded and overwhelmed. Thrusting hands plucked at our clothing. Pane. Biscotti. Sigarette. In every direction there was a wall of emaciated, hungry, dirty faces.

I had had the notion that the people would be hostile, or
resentful, or perhaps reserved. I had expected that they would indicate in some way the feelings they had had as enemies in the past three years.

But there was no question of war or enmity here. Hunger governed all. There were some who in their need fawned and grovelled. They thrust their dribbling children forward to whine and plead. VVhen a soldier threw out a handful of sweets there was a mad rush to the pavement, and women and men and children beat at each other as they scrabbled on the cobblestones.

…

It had not needed the Allied invasion to throw the social economy of the country out of gear; it was steadily decaying of its own accord. And yet this was an Axis partner, not a country beaten and occupied by the Germans. For three years Mussolini had been on the winning side. He was lord of the Balkans. He even occupied part of France.

Italy had every reason to fare better than any country in Europe save Germany. Its government had been in office for two decades. And now here was Naples broken and half-starving. In addition, something more precious than buildings and bridges was gone; the spirit of the people themselves. They had no will any more. They were reduced to the final humiliation of begging from the people they had tried to kill.

For anyone who loved Italy it was a bitter experience to come to Naples. The traditional talents of the people, their charm and generosity, seemed for a little to have vanished in the savage and abject struggle for existence. I met quite a number of distinguished and honourable Italians in Naples, good haters of Fascism for many years, and the thing that they saw clearly at last was this: ‘We failed to revolt. Everything had derived from that. Nothing we could have suffered in a revolt against Fascism would have been as bad as this.’

The italians were forced from Mussolini in a war, they don´t want and don`t understood.
In the WWI allied with Great Britain uns France against Germany and now fighting alongside together with the former enemy. Why? Because of Mussolinis craving for status.
Because Mussolini imitats the “Führer”.
It wasn´t the war of the italian people. It was only Mussolinis war.

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Updated 75 (and 70) years after the event…

World War II Today continues to follow the war through to August 1945, although not every day - alongside these stories will be the dramatic events of 75 years ago, the first battles in France, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the beginning of the Blitz.
I hope many of you will wish to keep following the war as I add more pictures, newsreels and new stories in the coming months and years. I shall also be developing new ways of exploring the hundreds of different stories already here.
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best regards
Martin